Unsentences

Where do the words go

every time my head feels like a bottomless abyss?

I’ve often wondered.

Words are such curious creatures;

imagined scribbles pretending to have weight,

lines and loops arranged so precisely

meaning starts believing in itself.

And you wonder,

what would a world be like without words, 

a world that never learned to name hunger,

to enunciate pain,

to call loneliness by smaller, easier names.

But you’ve never known such a world,

nor do you wish to,

because words are convenient,

like curtains, 

they make the room look lived in.

And yet, so often,

words scatter formless like grains of sand —

always there, but never quite enough

to make up geographies.

They slip between thought and throat,

pieces from different jigsaws

puddled in muddy water,

each reflecting a face that almost looks like yours

but speaks a language you don’t recall learning.

Words should build,

but mine only erode.

Every sentence I start

feels like a diagnosis of declining memory.

Words are all I have,

I have often told myself,

as if clinging to syllables

could prevent drowning.

But on such nights,

when meaning goes missing

and memory forgets to be linear,

words seem farther than a nightmare —

they flicker like streetlights over wet asphalt,

alive just long enough

to tease recognition.

Sometimes I wonder

if words grow tired of me too —

of being summoned like unpaid labourers

to construct coherence

around a chaos that refuses to stay still.

Maybe that’s why they slip away mid-sentence,

taking with them my right to sound articulate

about tales from times I could neither forget nor forgive.

It’s strange,

how we trust language

to confess the incommunicable.

I keep writing as if ink

were an antidote to entropy,

as if metaphors could rearrange

the ruins into residence.

But every poem begins with hope

and ends with amnesia.

Every stanza feels like an obituary

written for a feeling

that refused to die properly.

There are nights

when even my vocabulary looks back at me,

unimpressed.

Adjectives roll their eyes,

verbs yawn,

and nouns sit quietly

like corpses waiting to be named again.

I try to speak to them,

but my tongue forgets the choreography.

I’m fluent only in pauses now;

their slow, aching dialect of hesitation.

And maybe that’s the truth:

words don’t vanish,

they retreat.

They watch from a distance

as I crumble in syntax and style,

waiting for me to admit

that silence was the first language, 

and I’ve only ever been mistranslating it.

Where do the words go?

Maybe nowhere.

Maybe they stay right here,

stuck to the roof of thought,

too tired to fall into meaning.

Or maybe they escape

like guilt, like God,

like everything else

that once promised permanence

but grew bored of staying.

And perhaps that’s why I keep doing this —

scribbling real elegies for fictional alphabets,

hoping the words I’ve lost

somehow find their way back home

maybe through someone else’s mouth.

Until then,

I’ll keep whispering into the abyss,

not to be heard,

but to remind it

that once, I too

was made of language.